Celso and Cora is a feature-length “direct cinema” film about a young couple and their two children living in Manila. They make a living selling cigarettes on the sidewalk outside a downtown hotel. These are poor people, but the film deals as much in individual psychology and the universal politics of family life as it does with this particular family's everyday efforts, against all odds, to keep their children fed. The story of their lives over a three-month period is constructed, without commentary, from a compilation of detail, episode by episode, like the exposition of a dramatic narrative. The film relies equally on “on-camera” conversation and observed interactional discussion among the main characters, their extended family members, and the other people they come in contact with daily. Traditional montage has been abandoned in favor of articulating the film's individual ‘pieces of time' with momentary grey spaces.
Gary Kildea is an Australian independent filmmaker, best known for his films Trobriand Cricket (with anthropologist Jerry Leach) and Ileksen--Politics in Papua New Guinea (with Dennis O'Rourke).